Posts Tagged ‘errors’

Physicians do many errors, deadly ones too: The least is to admit making mistakes

Posted by: adonis49 on: June 21, 2015

In: Essays | health/medicine | social articles
Leave a Comment

Doctors make mistakes. The best medicine is for them to admit it!

June 9, 2015 beirutsniper@yahoo.com

From the wrong diagnosis to the wrong prescription, medical errors kill more than bullets in this country—and injure many more.

Until doctors break their code of silence, the cure is a long way off.

When they save lives, and they often do, doctors are treated like gods. Lebanese doctors even manage to believe they really are.

No one is as unreachable as your doctors, they make you wait, they treat to you as if you are stupid, they barely talk to you, they don’t make an effort to explain your problem, and they never give you enough time.

But it’s all ok! because they make you feel better, they make the ones you love feel better, and one day, they will save your life.

But what happens when they make mistakes?

should we still treat them like gods and gods are never judged? or should we punish them like normal human beings?

In my humble opinion, the answer is “none of the above”, and here is why.

1- Let’s all agree that no one is untouchable and doctor or no doctor, whoever makes a mistake needs to pay, and people who pay for their mistakes tend to learn and make less mistakes afterward.

While on the other hand, whoever knows is untouchable, will naturally pay less attention and make more mistakes.

It is also said that people learn from their mistakes? So how are doctors learning how is the med. community learning to avoid future errors?

2- Doctors cannot and should not pay for their mistakes the way we do…

I mean take me for example, a blogger with poor English skills, if I make a mistake no one cares, same for a car dealer or a graphic designer or an architect, for us, mistakes have no, to very little consequences.

Except if you are messi and you miss a penalty in the champions league final, than you are a god and you will be punished like a human being….

Now imagine if every time you make a mistake someone dies, would you still write?

Would you still shoot the penalty? would you still sell cars? or draw buildings or design logos?… I wouldn’t… and I personally don’t believe doctor needs to be treated and punished the same way we do.

So yes it’s true dear doctor that you give birth, save lives, give hope, draw smiles, announce death and new lives.

It’s also true that this might give you the feeling that you are a god, but you are not…

And even if you were, nothing justifies not admitting your mistakes and taking some responsibility.

And sometimes, for those who are victims of your mistakes, admitting you did, can bring them a lot of comfort, and this is what you are supposed to do.

Tags: adonis49, code of silence, Doctors, errors, mistakes, physicians

Fallacies, Biases, Illusions, effects, trendencies, errors… and “The Art of Thinking Clear”

Posted by: adonis49 on: October 7, 2014

In: Book Review | engineering/research/experiments | Essays | professional articles | social articles
Leave a Comment

Fallacies, Biases, Illusions, effects, trendencies, errors… and “The Art of Thinking Clear”

By Rolf Dobelli

This book is a simple guide to “less irrational” behaviors and tendencies, as we get aware of the hundreds of biases that are ingrained in our behaviors.

I have reviewed two dozen of these 99 listed biases and added my comments.

“It isn’t what we know that gets in our way. It is what we believe” Physicist Harold Puthoff

“We’d rather be roughly right than precisely right” Lord Keynes

“Faced with the choice between changing our mind and proving there is no need to do so, everyone gets busy on the proof” (John Kenneth Galbraith)

1. Survivorship Bias

2. Swimmer’s body illusion

3. Clustering illusion

4. Social proof effect

5. Sunk cost effect

6. Reciprocity

7. Confirmation

8. Authority

9. Contrast effect

10. Availability

11. Getting worse before getting better fallacy

12. Story bias

13. In hindsight illusion

14. Overconfidence bias

15. Chauffeur knowledge

16. Illusion of control

17. Insensitive Super-Response tendency

18. Regression to mean fallacy

19. Outcome bias

20. Paradox of choice

21. Liking bias

22. Endowment effect

23. Coincidence fallacy

24. Group think effect

25. Neglect of Probability

26. Scarcity Error

27. Base-rate neglect

28. Gambler’s fallacy

29. The Anchor

30. Induction

31. Loss aversion

32. Social loafing

33. Exponential growth

34. Winner’s curse

35. Fundamental attribution error

36 False causality

37. Halo effect

38. Alternative path

39. Forecast illusion

40. Conjunction fallacy

41. Framing

42. Action bias

43. Omission bias

44. Self-serving

45. Hedonic treadmill

46. Sel-selection bia

47. Beginner’s luck

48. Cognitive dissonance

49. Hyperbolic discounting

50. Because Justification

51. Decision fatigue

52. Contagion bias

53. Problems with averages

54. Motivation crowding

55. Twaddle tendency

56. Will Roger phenomenon

57. Information bias

58. Effort justification

59. Law of small numbers

60. Expectations

61. Simple logic fallacy

62. Forer effect

63. Volunteer’s folly

64. Affect heuristic

65 Introspection illusion

66. Inability to close doors

67. Neomania

68. Sleeper effect

69. Alternative blindness

70. Social comparison

71. Primacy and recency effects

72. “Not invented here” syndrome

73. The Black Swan

74. Domain Dependence

75. False-Consensus

76. Falsification of History bias

77. In-group, out-group biases

78. Ambiguity aversion

79. Default, standard option effects

80. Fear of regret

81. Salience effect

82. House-Money effect

83. Procrastination

84. Envy vs jealousy

85. Personification

86. Illusion of paying attention

87. Planning fallacy

88. Zeigarnik effect

89. Illusion of skills

90. Feature=positive effect

91. Cherry picking tendency

92. Single cause fallacy

93 Intention to treat errors

94. News illusion

Note 1: As you read these 100 tendencies to commit errors of judgment, try to add other systematic biases to the list

Try to add a title or a short statement that succinctly describe the topic.

Note 2: The exigencies of living lead us to stick to most of our biases and fallacies. We tend to procrastinate acting on our well-intentioned decisions that could correct our ill-conceived methodology to run our life.

Note 3: To better comprehend these types of behavioral errors or shortcomings, the best way is to try various taxonomies (categorizing) for these biases, fallacies… that lead to errors

1. You may define these terms and delimit how they differ and sort them accordingly

2. You may sort them according to cognitive, social, evolutionary perspectives

3. Sort them according to your field of interest so that you rely on a shorter list when reviewing failed projects and erasing the biases that were taken care of.

4. Group them for correlation or seemingly contradictory behaviors

Tags: adonis49, Art of thinking clear, Biases, effects, errors, fallacies, fallacy, Harold Puthoff, Illusions, John Kenneth Galbraith, less irrational behaviors, Rolf Dobelli, trendencies

Most common of errors…Apophenia? Patternicity? Pareidolia?

Posted by: adonis49 on: September 27, 2012

In: Essays | Human Factors/Ergonomics | professional articles | sciences | social articles
6 Comments

Most common of errors…Apophenia? Patternicity? Pareidolia?

There are different types of mistakes and errors that people commit, like you and me, the little people, managers,“leaders” new and old”, scientists, researchers, politicians…

1. Mistakes “reserved” for management of people https://adonis49.wordpress.com/2012/09/24/13-mistakes-new-learders-makes-this-taboo-number-as-if-older-leaders-ever-diminish-this-number-of-mistakes/

2. Mistakes with complicated created “professional” terms attached to them (for this post)

3. Mistakes organized in taxonomies, or check lists…https://adonis49.wordpress.com/2008/10/04/whats-that-concept-of-human-factors-in-design/

4. Errors and mistakes in conducting controlled experiment, particularly on human subjects

5. Human and machines mistakes https://adonis49.wordpress.com/2008/10/19/whats-that-concept-of-human-factors-in-design-continue-21/

6. Mistakes never reminded of…and never accounted for…and never confronted with

Let’s read the second types of complicated mistakes. I think this list was posted by Graham Coghill on freshly pressed a while ago:

“Apophenia” leads you to believe, wrongly, that you have evidence to support a position when you don’t.

You believe you can continue to gamble because you’re on a winning streak, or that Mars is inhabited because some observers see canal-like patterns on its surface. It can lead you to ignore evidence that falsifies your position, or that supports a contrary position.

What to do when confronted by this tactic?

Since it’s usually wishful thinking that leads us to find non-existent patterns, we need to guard against it first. Look for the signs, and guard against the temptation to dismiss evidence that doesn’t support your wishes.

Beware of those who try to exploit your tendency for wishful thinking and discipline yourself to accept only conclusion that are supported by real-world evidence.

Variations and related tactics:

Michael Shermer calls this cognitive bias ‘patternicity‘. It comes in several forms:

Pareidolia – finding shapes, such as faces, in things like clouds, geological features and slices of toast.
The gambler’s fallacy – believing that past random events can influence the probability of future ones, for example, that a flipped coin is more likely to show heads after a run of tails.
The clustering illusion – believing that the clusters that are always found in random data actually indicate something meaningful, for example, that a run of wins in a game of dice means you are on a winning streak.

In science, apophenia is related to what’s known as a Type I error, in which a test seems to show that two variables are related when, in fact, they are not.

It can also contribute to confirmation bias, in which an investigator deliberately looks for evidence which supports a favoured model and avoids evidence which refutes it.

Apophenia is also related to the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, in which a person zooms in on an apparent pattern in the midst of a sea of data, and claims that this is the key to a significant issue (as in the fable of the Texas sharpshooter who fires random shots at a wall, then draws the bullseye around the tightest cluster of bullet holes).

Examples:

On the political side of the debate over climate change, many fall into the trap of using current weather patterns to support their positions – a cold spell, for instance, is quoted as evidence that the earth is not warming.
Climate scientists are reluctant to claim that any particular event is due to global warming because they are aware of the dangers of the clustering illusion. Before any such pattern can be held up as real evidence, a convincing argument must be presented.
James Hansen and colleagues have recently published an analysis (here and here) which, they claim, shows that recent weather events are consequences of global warming.
Here’s how difficult it is to decide whether the clustering illusion is at work or not. In the early 200s, it became apparent that there was an unusually high occurrence of breast cancer among female employees at the ABC studios at Toowong in Queensland. In 2007, an expert panel found that the rate was 6 times higher than the rate of breast cancer in Queensland, and that there was only a 1 in 25 chance (estimated p value of 0.04) that this could have occurred by chance.
It found a correlation between breast cancer occurrence and length of service at the studio, but could find no evidence that the cancer was due to any factor related to the site or to genetic or lifestyle factors of the employees.
A 2009 study investigated breast cancer rates in ABC employees across Australia and found no increased rates in any other site. The ABC abandoned the Toowong studios and now operates from new facilities several kilometres away. Was the cancer cluster a statistical artefact or was there some yet unidentified cause?
In the early 1900s, German meteorologist Alfred Wegener noticed a pattern in the earth’s continental shapes. The edges of the continents appeared to fit into each other, like pieces of a jigsaw. This led him to believe they had once been joined together and he proposed his model of continental drift.
Although this model explained many observations, it was not accepted by earth scientists because Wegener was unable to come up with a mechanism that could account for continents moving. Discoveries in the 1950s and 1960s revealed a mechanism, and Wegener’s idea became incorporated into the Plate Tectonic model.

Note 1: Here is the link to Coghill’s post, at his polite request http://scienceornot.net/2012/08/14/perceiving-phoney-patterns-apophenia/.

Note 2: Fortunately, I don’t blog full-time or navigate the net to find out who have borrowed my ideas from the 3,100 articles that I posted: That would be a nightmare to keep track of and of no benefit, as far as I know. All that I am interested in is disseminate what is controversial and need to be discussed and reflected upon…

Adonis Diaries

Posts Tagged ‘errors’

adonis49

adonis49

Blogroll

adonis49

adonis49

adonis49

Blog Stats

Top Posts

adonis49

adonis49

Email subscription

Adonis Diaries

Posts Tagged ‘errors’

Physicians do many errors, deadly ones too: The least is to admit making mistakes

Doctors make mistakes. The best medicine is for them to admit it!

Share this:

Like this:

Fallacies, Biases, Illusions, effects, trendencies, errors… and “The Art of Thinking Clear”

Share this:

Like this:

Most common of errors…Apophenia? Patternicity? Pareidolia?

What to do when confronted by this tactic?

Variations and related tactics:

Examples:

Share this:

Like this:

adonis49

adonis49

Blogroll

adonis49

adonis49

adonis49

Blog Stats

Top Posts

adonis49

adonis49

Email subscription